Quotes About Maturity

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company.

The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.

In certain matters, some sailors even in mature life remain unsophisticated enough. But a young seafarer of the disposition of our athletic foretopman is much of a child-man. And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes. But in Billy Budd intelligence, such as it was, had advanced while yet his simplemindedness remained for the most part unaffected.

Lord, when shall we be done growing?

She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.

The girl you marry, and the woman you must make a life with, are two different people.

It was like the hate of a husband for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreakable tie to a loathsome person, and existing not as a self-justification, but for the rotten gleam of pleasure it gave off in the continuing gloom. Out

left to the inferior animals called older people.

A child isn't born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let's just say that when I realized that I didn't want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can't go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.

youth is quick in feeling but weak in judgement.

Young men's minds are always changeable, but when an old man is concerned in a matter, he looks both before and after.

Then thus the blue-eyed maid: O full of days!

I didn't treat my girl like she was mine Yeah, I thought I didn't need her at the time But I changed my way of thinkin' when she left Yeah, I finally learned my lesson, but I learned it by myself

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn't say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end

becoming a grown-up did not mean good things were waiting for you.

Plus. the feeling of sudden adulthood that came with getting drunk wasn't bad either.

It's to the effect that America has progressed from infancy to senility without having passed through a period of maturity.

Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.

No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.

Other tokens of maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses gathered at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose silver bracelets around a freckled wrist, and the fact that whenever she moved, the air about her tasted of rose water.

He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged.

Older men were better companions, they were seasoned lovers, they knew the world, they knew themselves. Unlike younger men, they held their emotions in balance. They had read more, seen more, they were warmer, kinder, less boastful, more tolerant, less violent. They were more interesting, they could choose the wine. They had more money.

So much for youthful idealism.